The global marketing automation market generated $4,438.7 million in revenue in 2020. It is predicted to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.3% between 2020 and 2030. According to the Marketing Automation Market Research report, the key factors driving the market's growth involve:
- The adoption of digital marketing is becoming more popular.
- Social media usage across the globe is on the rise.
- Small and medium businesses (SMEs) are increasingly using automated marketing tools.
But what is marketing automation, and how is it set to evolve? This blog post will provide you with an overview of marketing automation, covering different types of software available, when to invest in it, and critical marketing automation tactics. Given that, you can better understand marketing automation platforms, and utilize them effectively to accelerate and boost productivity in your marketing funnels.
What is marketing automation used for?
Marketing automation is a system that automatically handles, analyzes, and streamlines digital marketing activities. It covers website monitoring, email marketing, social marketing, live chats, lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing, in-line support, and much more. Instead of conducting manual, repetitive procedures, marketing automation will help you get more done in less time, cut down resources, and focus on strategic tasks. Thus, you can improve customer experiences, increase revenues and gain an advantage over competitors relying on manual processes.
Marketing automation software brings numerous benefits. The below chart shows its main advantages.
Source: Marketing Automation Report 2021 by ZHAW School of Management and Law.
Types of marketing automation software
There are different types of marketing automation tools available. According to Oracle, we can break it down into ten main types of software.
| # | Types of marketing automation | Description | Example (*) |
| 1 | Customer relationship management (CRM) | CRM helps automate sales processes and effectively manage, analyze, and improve your customer data. This will ensure support for strong, productive, and loyal relationships with customers at every stage of their journey. | - HubSpot - Pardot (by Salesforce) - AgileCRM |
| 2 | Lead management automation | It automatically generates, scores, and nurtures sales/marketing leads from various sources, like web registration, email marketing campaigns, multichannel campaigns, database marketing, social media, and trade show lists. | - Clearbit - Leadfeeder - Act-On - LeadSquared |
| 3 | Email marketing automation | It facilitates the setting up of web-based forms, maximizes your reach, automatically emails users for specific triggers, and provides a variety of reports (click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, non-subscriber, and more). | - Mailchimp - Automizy - Constant Contact - Customer.io - Drip |
| 4 | Social media marketing automation | It’s used to reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive social media tasks and allow you to create more engaging content. These tasks can cover scheduling posts ahead of time, curating content for republishing, resolving routine customer queries, and producing social media analytics reports. | - Sprout Social - Hootsuite - Buffer - CoSchedule |
| 5 | Analytics, and segmentation automation | This software enables you to visualize, organize and analyze the market segmentation and customer data, resulting in producing more in-depth and actionable insights for your business. | - Pyze - Woopra |
| 6 | Advertising, and promotion automation | The system analyzes user behavior to create proper bidding strategies and then adjusts a series of relevant ads through many digital channels. | - AdRoll - Zalster - Revealbot - Trapica |
| 7 | Pricing automation | This tool makes it easier to analyze user behavior to increase or decrease prices within a given range. The automated system will then use this range to tailor prices for different users, making more sales and earning more profits. | - Informed Marketing Solutions - Skuuudle |
| 8 | Marketing workflow automation | The workflow automation tool enables businesses to automate their operational activities by designing custom workflows. You can get more done in less time, build scalable workflows solutions and focus on solving more complex problems. | - Oracle - Formstack - Integrify |
| 9 | Sales force automation | Sales force automation (SFA) is used to create workflows making sales management more efficient, effective, and error-free, minimizing the amount of manual, repetitive tasks for sales reps. | - Oracle - Salesforce Sales Cloud - Zendesk sell - HubSpot |
| 10 | Loyalty, and referral marketing automation | It helps you spur and take advantage of buzz, taking your referral and loyalty programs to new heights. This way, you can build trust and loyalty among customers, reach more significant audiences and save money on advertising costs. | - Referral Rock - TapMango - Ambassador - Clutch |
(*): These examples only include some players in the industry, they do not represent the whole sector.
When is it the right time to invest in marketing automation?
The right time for your business to invest in marketing automation is when:
- You are producing and publishing a wide variety of high-quality content.
- Your content aligns with your customer's behaviors and their journey.
- You generate a steady flow of new and organic leads.
- The marketing and sales teams have agreed on where customers' conversations end with marketing and begin with sales.
- Apart from emails, you are monitoring your leads' digital behavior across all touchpoints and marketing channels.
- More importantly, you are ready to scale your marketing efforts to the next level.
These are good signs to identify whether an automated marketing platform is the right move for your business. But, the critical point here is that marketing automation does not do marketing for you. It only can help scale your successful marketing initiatives.
4 key marketing automation tactics
Not every business or marketing team is ready to streamline its operation. When the time comes, marketing automation solutions may take a great marketing plan to new heights. Applying a marketing automation tool is not enough to achieve significant results. What makes the difference is developing tactics that enable you to maximize the system's potential and get better results. So, let's look at four key marketing automation tactics for both large companies and startups.
Use dynamic, adaptive content to engage your potential customers
The first critical thing to get a better result out of any automated marketing tool is to have dynamic, quality content and messaging. You can utilize this type of content and your content strategy align with customers’ behaviors and interests. This way makes it easier to convince and engage potential customers with your content. Not all content types are created equal. Blog posts and articles, for example, are good at the top of the funnel. But when customers are considering buying your product, you need visual content (e.g., videos, animated, slide presentations, product demos). Typically, a new lead is at the awareness stage. With the right content through nurture campaigns, you can move these leads from the awareness to the consideration and the decision stage. You can convert them from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Use email sequences to follow up with prospects
With automated marketing software, you can create many email sequences that can be scheduled and delivered to different leads based on their behavior changes. This way, you can identify engaged subscribers who open, click, and take action on emails. Along with that, you can enroll them in other sequences tailored to their specific journey to boost sales. For example, you can use email sequences to follow up with prospects when they:
- Place an order
- Attend an event at your store
- Sign up for your email newsletter
- Registering for a report or white paper
- Abandon a shopping cart
- Engage with customers service
- Not place an order for a while
Leverage marketing automation in list segmentation
There is a lot of information you can obtain from your leads. However, making a list segmentation can be done manually; this takes much time and can be prone to manual errors. You can segment your list from your settings automatically by marketing automation software. Customers or leads can be categorized based on different criteria, like their demographics, ages, geographical information, past buying behavior, engagement level, etc. You can also get as creative as possible with segmentation depending on the crucial metrics for your business.
Automate team collaborations in real-time
Before you gain customers, many departments cannot seamlessly share information with other departments. This problem could even be more pronounced when you have customers.
Today, with the use of marketing automation tools, every detail can be shared, tracked, and accessed across departments by every stakeholder in real-time, increasing transparency and providing complete visibility. Given that, it helps improve internal communication, resolve issues faster, and provide a valuable experience for customers.
With all the above analyses, it is clear to see how essential marketing automation is. We also have another article written by our project manager who has experience working in the Marketing Automation projects, How to build a marketing automation platform.
Read also:
- How to build an efficient Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for startups
- How to estimate the cost of custom software development reasonably
- How to write a practical “Agile” software product specification for startups
- Why should startups consider Flutter for cross-platform app development
- How to validate your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for startups
Final thoughts,
Running a successful digital business takes lots of work and time. Therefore, any tools that can make things operate faster and more efficiently are a valuable investment. While marketing automation is becoming increasingly widespread, many businesses have yet to leverage its full potential. Marketing automation has far beyond the capabilities of email newsletters. Your team can now use it to unlock the power of consumer data, build highly personalized experiences and enhance your business efficiency.
We hope this sharing can help you better understand an overview of marketing automation. Given that, you can build your unique marketing automation and make the most of this tool for better marketing results.
References:
- What is marketing automation?, www.oracle.com.
- ZHAW School of Management and Law, Marketing Automation Report 2021: Lead Generation and Lead Qualification Through Data-Driven Marketing in B2B, www.digitalcollection.zhaw.ch.
